BBC Master Photographers: Ansel Adams

I have discovered a really interesting series that the BBC broadcast back in 1983. It consists of six interviews with some of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century – Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Andre Kertesz, Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams, Andreas Feininger, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. In the interviews, they discuss how they became interested in photography, their influences, their processes, insights, and aims. You can find the series on YouTube or on the Internet Archive.

So far, I have only watched the episode on Ansel Adams. He is, after all,  my all time favourite landscape photographer. But I am looking forward to working my way through the entire series.

To whet your appetite, here are some quotes from Ansel Adams.

The negative is the score; the print is the performance.

Adams was a musician before he became a photographer, so it was natural for him to express himself in musical metaphors. This really resonated with me. It implies that there are two equally important aspects to the photographic process. Translating into digital terms, the first is the composition of the photograph and the creation of the RAW file. But this is only the starting point. Equally important is the work of processing that file in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever. As for Adams, it seems he was never satisfied with his ‘performance’ of his favourite images, which he would reprint from time to time in search of a fresh interpretation.

I never bracket. Bracketing is a sign of insecurity.

I was amused by this because bracketing seems to have become such an important part of digital photography. It seems that every photography book I own recommends taking three (or five or even seven) photos at slightly different exposures when faced with a scene with a high dynamic range. But Adams, working without the luxury of a digital camera and with only a handheld spot meter, learned to judge the correct exposure of a scene by eye. That, I think, should be the goal we aim for rather than relying too heavily on the camera to do the work for us. Of course, with digital processing techniques, it is possible to blend the bracketed images together to create a high dynamic range (HDR) image. (Personally, I’m not terribly keen on HDR photography – a lot of the time it seems to create surrealistic results.)

The painter’s approach is synthetic. The photographer’s approach is analytic.

I think what he is getting at is that the painter starts with a blank canvas and builds up something that represents or expresses his subject. By contrast, the photographer starts with the full messiness of the reality in front of them and extracts from that something that will make a striking image.